The Methods Used Were Largely Effective

Careers based around criminology play an essential part in everyday society, both protecting and stabilising communities and all who reside in them, and over the past few years it has become apparent to me that this is a subject I find both intriguing and compelling. My interest in the subject first developed in late childhood when I became fascinated with programmes such as Scott and Bailey, which look at crime prevention and the effect crime has on society. After spending a week of work experience with the MOD police based at DSTL at Porton Down, my passion for working within this field developed further, leading to a desire to understand why criminals act the way they do. This is ultimately what has led me to apply for the Criminology course. My A levels have helped me to develop my essay writing and analytical ability, focusing on investigating theories and texts and drawing my own conclusions from them.

To begin with, statistics can be defined as the practice or science of collecting and analyzing numerical data in large quantities, especially for the purpose of inferring proportions in a whole from those in a representative sample. Criminal justice on the other hand is defined as the system of practices and institutions of governments directed at upholding social control, deterring and mitigating crime, or sanctioning those who violate laws with criminal penalties and rehabilitation efforts. The use of statistics has been around for decades in a number of scholarly disciplines. More specifically, it has been an important vehicle in obtaining better knowledge in the field of criminal justice. This paper will discuss the role of statistics in criminal justice.

Measuring crime is based on three main measurements; criminal justice system data, crime experience surveys and other sources called administrative data (Hayes & Makkai, 2015). Firstly, crime first needs to be categorised into types of crime that is classified under the Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (Hayes & Makkai, 2015). Only the main and select few offences are reported by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) in collecting annual reported crimes (Hayes & Makkai, 2015). Through ABS, it collects crime data in different ways such as crime reports, victimisations surveys, administrative data (higher courts, magistrates and policing agendas etc.,) and self-reports (Hayes & Makkai, 2015). Crime reports measure crimes such as homicide, robbery, rape, assault and more but is collected through police jurisdictions (Reid, 2012). The strength of crime reports provides additional information such as arrests, charges, officers assaults and characteristics of homicide victims (Reid, 2012). This helps to measure crime more effectively through gaining descriptions and knowledge of identifying crime and criminal behaviour more accurately (Reid, 2012). Administrative data is often helpful in collating data of sentences and jail sentences but fails to collect the ‘dark figure’ of crime (Hayes & Makkai, 2015). National Crime Victimisation Surveys (NCVS)

There is debate whether youth crime is really a problem to society or just an issue that is constructed by society. It is argued that media has influenced society’s views on this matter by categorising young people as ‘folk devils’ (Banks, 2013). Certain groups, episodes and people that pose a threat to society’s values is when a moral panic takes place (Cohen, 1972). For example, this can be seen nowadays when there is no actual threat but old people get intimidated when they see large groups of young people hanging about on streets. These influences led to policy change, increasing the level of social control. This means that youth crime may be perceived as a moral panic rather than an actual problem.

Studies suggest that young people are often at risk of re-offending (e.g. Sharkey, et al, 2003; Vincent & Seagrave, 2005). Sharkey and his colleagues explained that youth often reoffend since, as they prepare themselves in returning to their respective communities, they are usually confronted by similar situations that had influenced their behaviors prior to committing offenses. Another group of researchers however show that youth engaged in education, employment and other productive endeavors in their communities within 6 to 8 months after their release are less vulnerable to commit another offense (e.g. Keating, et al., 2002, Bullis, et al, 2002, Grossman & Tierney, 2008).

would teach offenders a lesson and reduce their chances to recidivate. Stevens and Ward (1997) said that “retuning unprepared, uneducated, and unusually individuals to the community is the biggest threat to the public safety” (p. 106). Stevens and Ward conducted an experiment to examine the effects of education on incarcerated offenders. The experiment contained 60 student-inmates who had earned their associate or bachelor degree while incarcerated. The participants were inmates release from the North Carolina Department of Corrections (p. 108). The participants were tracked and their recidivism rate were compared with nonstudent inmates. Also, they gathered data from education and recidivism studies of thirty states. The result demonstrated

The purpose and intention of the research is to determine whether having a criminal justice degree benefit those that graduate within that field. In addition, future criminal justice graduates will have a sense of where their career path will lead to. Experts also examine if having a criminal justice degree is necessary for individuals to become police officers, correctional officers, or probation and parole officers. This research was published by the International journal of Criminal Justice Sciences in December of 2013. The authors thesis is that the individual perceptions of criminal justice and criminology majors are important because the data reveal can and will assist and better

The official statistics are particularly useful in that they have been collected since 1857 and so provide us with an excellent historical overview of changing trends over time. They also give us a completely accurate view of the way that the criminal justice system processes offenders through arrests, trials and punishments. However, official statistics cannot be taken simply at their face value. They only show crimes which are reported to and recorded by official agencies such as the police. They account for only those crimes which are recognised as such by victims and those detected by the police. Sociologists have argued that there exists a ‘dark figure’ of unrecorded crime. This may be due to social agencies ignoring crimes committed by the ruling class such as white-collar and corporate crime and their views and stereotypes that they have against certain individuals, such as the working-class and ethnic minorities. Arguably, another reason why police recorded may be seem as inaccurate is due to the increased problem of reporting issues. There is evidence that a number of individuals choose not to report a crime on the basis that they have little faith in social agencies or that they feel that the crime may not be serious enough. Positivists favour the official statistics as they believe that they are functional for society, whereas interactionists and Marxists go against the police the statistics as they argue that they are bias. In this essay, I will discuss the

Courts do not favor research conducted on student samples. Currently, the courts do not use a majority of published articles on jury studies because the studies are based on sample sizes consisting of college students. Juries feel that due to this the study is not generalizable and the results are not useful. However this results in useful data and research findings that could help shape the efficiency of courts being dismissed. Some of the arguments that are put forth about the disadvantages of using college students are that in the real world they only make up a very small percentage of what actual jurors are made up of. Real jurors would consist of members from varying age groups, educational backgrounds, and socioeconomic status. Student samples on the other hand consist of a small age range and homogenous educational background and similar socioeconomic status. In addition, college students are more susceptible to pressures from their peers and hence would pick a verdict of guilty or not guilty based on what they believe their peers would pick as opposed to what they actually feel is

The Extent to Which Official Crime Statistics Provides a Reliable Estimate of the Amount of Crime Committed in England and Wales

During this essay, I will be discussing recorded crime statistics and victimisation surveys as they are our primary techniques of measuring levels and trends of crime. After briefly explaining what is meant by these terms, I will seek to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses in order to question the extent to which they are reliable resources that provide us with accurate information.

I will be discussing crime rates, statistics and comparing crime rates college data. I will be comparing University of Texas at Arlington and Texas Southern University. In Conclusion of my research UTA had the highest crime rates in alcohol arrest, domestic violence, stalking, motor vehicle theft, sexual assaults, but TSU had more burglaries. I think this is the case that UTA crime rates or high because it is a diverse University and some of the crimes that are committed some cultures can get away with in in their country but not in Texas or the U.S.

ESSAY QUESTION: ‘Examine Sociological explanations for the lower rates of recorded crime in rural compared to urban areas’…

The problem of the research design is that it does not accurately take into consideration all the numerous factors that exist beyond criminality. There are plenty more variable that should be taken into account when considering the potential of electing austere leadership forced by social and political degradation. The consequences of the research design is that it places too much emphasis on non-historical data on a single facet of a country, which will provide a good background, but criminality has many factors regarding its

The two main research strategies in conducting research are Quantitative and Qualitative. “Data that are treated as quantitative are either numbers or attributes that can be ordered in terms of magnitude”.(Bachman and Schutt, n.d.).This was a focal point as the findings and statistics supported his theory of undergraduate students being perpetrators of crime through statistical figures and tables. Alongside this, open ended questionnaire and student interviews were carried out thus making the research article generally a mixed method study. Qulaitative( add defitnition) .Linked with the qualitative strategy is the positivist approach. This methodology though may involve the use of deliberate falsification and recall error may have been a reason for why Neil Selwyn may have restricted the use of qualitative methods. Indeed students may answer according to their biases and may struggle to recall 3 months during their previous term. Data was collected from 18 other universities including Cardiff University. Selwyn makes a sound comparison to the Higher Educational Statistic Agency (HESA) stating that the sample